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The unending game of "pretend" that the U.S. media allow George Bush
to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances
hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though
they were plausible - as though a class of third-graders couldn't
demolish them with a few innocent questions - feels like the
journalistic equivalent of waterboarding. Gasp! Some truth, please!

I suggest the prez has forfeited the right to command a headline, or
half a story, or an uninterrupted quote: ". . . we'll defend
ourselves, but at the same time we're actively working with our
partners to spread peace and democracy," he said last week in Austria.

Surely "spreading democracy" should no longer be allowed to appear in
print, between now and 2008, unless accompanied by a parenthetical
clarification ("not true," stated as profanely as local standards
allow). And that, of course, would only be the media's first step back
into integrity with the public.

The occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the entire war
(to promote) terror . . . please, please, can these no longer be
trotted out in consequence-free abstraction, but as the high-tech
malevolence they are, actively continuing the incalculable devastation
of countries and their populations?

The bodies keep piling up, the toxic horrors spread. Hasn't anyone in
this place ever heard of depleted uranium? Is the health crisis in
Iraq and, indeed, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, not to
mention Kosovo and among returning vets for the last four American
wars, somehow irrelevant to "the course" we're asked to stay?

"Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never
seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient.
For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient
with two cancers - one in his stomach and kidney. Months later,
primary cancer was developing in his other kidney - he had three
different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in
families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected
by cancer. . . . My wife has nine members of her family with cancer."

This is Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the oncology center at the
largest hospital in Basra, speaking in 2003 at a peace conference in
Japan. Why is it that only peace activists are able to hear people
like this? Why hasn't he been asked to testify before Congress as its
members debate the future of this war and the next?

"Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning," he went on.
"They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used
to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues.
Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most.
However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the
body and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also
common."

Depleted uranium - DU - is the Defense Establishment euphemism for
U-238, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process and the ultimate
dirty weapon material. It's almost twice as dense as lead, catches
fire when launched and explodes on impact into microscopically fine
particles, or "nano-particles," which are easily inhaled or absorbed
through the skin; it's also radioactive, with a half-life of 4.468
billion years.

And we make bombs and bullets out of it - it's the ultimate
penetrating weapon. We dropped at least 300 tons of it on Iraq during
Gulf War I (the first time it was used in combat) and created Gulf War
Syndrome. This time around, the estimated DU use on defenseless Iraq
is 1,700 tons, far more of it in major population centers. Remember
shock and awe? We were pounding Baghdad, in those triumphant early
days, with low-grade nuclear weapons, raining down cancer,
neurological disorders, birth defects and much, much more on the
people we claimed to be liberating. We weren't spreading democracy, we
were altering the human genome.

As we "protected ourselves," in the words of the president, from
Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, we opened our own
arsenal of WMD on them, contaminating the country's soil and polluting
its air - indeed, unleashing a nuclear dust into the troposphere and
contaminating the whole world.

"We used to think (DU) traveled up to a hundred miles," Chris Busby
told me. Busby, a chemical physicist and member of the British
government's radiation risk committee, as well as the founder of the
European Committee of Radiation Risk, has monitored the air quality in
Great Britain. Based on his findings, "It looks like it goes quite
around the planet," he said.

While Bush mouths ironic whoppers - "We will be standing with the
people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes for freedom and
liberty are fulfilled," he told the U.N. General Assembly a while back
- his actions pass, in the words of former Livermore Labs scientist
Leuren Moret, "a death sentence on the Middle East and Central Asia."

A war crime of unprecedented dimension is unfolding as we avert our
eyes. Perhaps it's simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull
ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what
they're doing and it will all turn out for the best. Meanwhile, the
contagion spreads, the children die, the planet becomes uninhabitable.